Zhana Ivanova
Counterpoint (2018 / 2021)
Performance, 28 min

Actors:
Finn Adrian Jorkjen
Mohammad Shiraz Khan
Sindre Strand Offerdal

About Counterpoint (2018/2021):
Three men perform subtle gestures without speaking and do their best to match the narration of a disembodied male voice that booms over a loudspeaker for all to hear. What are we witnessing? And what is the character of the interaction on view: erotic, violent, rivalrous? A fight or a dance? Is one the perpetrator, the other the victim, the third a witness? Dominance and control are implied (they always are in Ivanova’s performances) as the actors seem to test one another’s boundaries, moving around and sometimes touching. In Counterpoint, our contemporary social and political landscape is metaphorically laid bare in stark abstraction, akin to a Samuel Beckett play. In so doing, the work extends the very tenets of the artist’s oeuvre as a whole: her subtle, performance-based pieces consistently reveal the unwritten but omnipresent rules, codes, and systems of human interaction. We are all, she helps us understand, controlled by these codes and rules and the metadata of information that undergird them—we might just not always either know it or be able to see it for what it is.